I neither love nor hate it. It's pretty good. The concept is great; the execution is a bit too injokey and unstructured. Perhaps the main problem is that you need to be pretty savvy and experienced regarding pop philosophy to know what the point of the allegory is (without expending a fair amount of effort), but the sorts of people most likely to make the crude errors The Simple Truth is correcting aren't likely to be particularly savvy.
I do love The Twelve Virtues, though I think they could easily be compressed to something cleaner and easier to remember (e.g., with less built-in redundancy). For instance, Relinquishment and Humility seem to just be special cases of Lightness and Evenness (with a dash of cog-sci Empiricism/Scholarship, mayhap).
If I were redoing the list, I'd go with Ten Virtues, something more like: Curiosity, Daring, Attentiveness, Lightness, Evenness, Simplicity, Precision, Rigor, Community, The Void.
('Argument' breaks up into Daring and Community, 'Empiricism' breaks up into Daring and Attentiveness and Simplicity and pretty much all of the other virtues, 'Scholarship' breaks up into Rigor and Community, etc. I'd still want virtues like Scholarship explicitly talked about, but as more complicated practices that come out of the primary-color virtues.)
MIRI's ongoing effort to publish the sequences as an eBook has given us the opportunity to update their contents and organization.
We're looking for suggested posts to reorder, add, or remove.
To help with this, here is a breakdown of the current planned contents of the eBook and any currently planned modifications. Following that is a list of the most popular links within the sequences to posts that are not included therein.
Now's a good time to suggested changes or improvements!
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Map and Territory
Added …What's a Bias Again? because it's meant to immediately follow Why Truth, And….
Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions
No changes.
A Human's Guide to Words
No changes.
How to Actually Change Your Mind
Politics is the Mind-Killer
Removed The Robbers Cave Experiment because it already appears in Death Spirals and the Cult Attractor, and there in the original chronological order which flows better.
Death Spirals and the Cult Attractor
Removed The Litany Against Gurus because it already appears in Politics is the Mind-killer.
Seeing with Fresh Eyes
Removed Asch's Conformity Experiment and Lonely Dissent because they both appear at the end of Death Spirals. Removed The Genetic Fallacy because it's in the Metaethics sequence: that's where it falls chronologically and it fits better there with the surrounding posts.
Noticing Confusion
Removed this entire subsequence because it is entirely contained within Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions.
Against Rationalization
Added Pascal's Mugging (before Torture vs Dust Specks) because it explains the 3^^^3 notation. Added Torture vs Dust Specks before A Case Study of Motivated Continuation because A Case Study refers to it frequently.
Against Doublethink
No changes.
Overly Convenient Excuses
Removed How to Convince Me that 2+2=3 because it's already in Map & Territory.
Letting Go
No change.
The Simple Math of Evolution
Added Evolutionary Psychology because it fits nicely at the end and it's referred to by other posts many times.
Challenging the Difficult
No change.
Yudkowsky's Coming of Age
No change.
Reductionism
No change. (Includes the Zombies subsequence.)
Quantum Physics
No change. Doesn't include any "Preliminaries" posts, since they'd all be duplicates
Metaethics
No change.
Fun Theory
No change.
The Craft and the Community
No change.
Appendix
Includes:
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Here are the most-frequently-referenced links within the sequences to posts outside of the sequences (with a count of three or more). This may help you notice posts that you think should be included in the sequences eBook.
Suggestions?